Back when I first started grad school, I learned about John Wesley Powell. His career was both inspirational and tragic. And Powell’s career was also an interesting encapsulation of the history of the United States after the Civil War. John Wesley Powell was an explorer, a scientist, and, in some ways, a visionary.
You’ve probably not heard of Powell, however, unless you read my previous post about him. (Read it with this link.) That’s because he was a visionary who no one listened to. Let’s explore his curious career together.
Explorer – The John Wesley Powell Expedition
Powell fought in the Civil War, achieving the rank of major. He fought in several notable battles, including at Shiloh, where he lost one arm.
His real passion, however, was science and nature. After the war, Powell became a professor of natural science at Illinois Wesleyan University. It was in 1869, however, that he came to national attention for the first time.
In that year Powell, along with eight other companions, rafted the length of the Colorado River. This included rafting through the Grand Canyon (in wooden rafts, no less), a dangerous feat, particularly for a man with one arm. But, in the process, he and his companions mapped areas no one had mapped before. John Wesley Powell had filled in one of the last blank spaces on the map of North America.
Although the era of major geographic exploration of North America was over after Powell’s achievement, this was still an activity that captivated Americans of the time. Powell gained praise as an “awesomely resolute” explorer who had “unlocked the last great unknown region of the country and made it his own.”
Scientist – What Did John Wesley Powell Do?
As I wrote in my last post, Powell spent significant time in the American West. He realized something crucial in the process—the West was a dry place. It didn’t rain much. And that meant that if Americans were going to move to the West and farm, they must have reliable access to water. If they didn’t, they had no chance.
By the end of the 1870s, Powell realized another disconcerting trend. The places in the American West that did have reliable access to water were not, by and large, accessible to farmers. Corporations and cattlemen had control of the best access to water. That meant farmers who took up homesteads in the West were likely to fail. Even with free land, they couldn’t succeed without water.
It seemed a long shot, perhaps, but Powell wanted to do something about this. He was the head of the United States Geological Survey. By 1888, Powell was using the Geological Survey to survey land in the West, taking note of where the water was and who controlled it.
Then, he took an irrevocable step. Although it destroyed him, he took the step anyway: he applied science to the settlement of the American West. It was the rankest heresy anyone could proclaim in 1880s America. Instantly, he had more powerful enemies than anyone could counter.
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What Powell Did
Powell’s grievous sin was to withdraw land from settlement until the Geological Survey could categorize its access to water. After the Geological Survey finished its work, settlement could resume on a rational basis that would spare farmers great suffering. (Click here to read the full details oMf Powell’s settlement plan.)
Instantly, everyone with power in the West teamed up against Powell. Railroads threw their might behind lobbying Congress to ignore Powell. They wanted to sell land, water and the happiness of the people living on the land be damned. According to the railroads, this land, which railroads had gained for free from the national government in one of the greatest government subsidies of all time, must be sold in 160-acre plots, just like everywhere else in the country.
Western politicians, led by Bill Stewart of Nevada, piled on. They wanted people living in their states, period. More people meant more power in Congress. More people meant more economic development. These politicians cared little about the actual lives their residents lived. They wanted settlement, and they wanted it now, not after a government bureau gave the go-ahead.
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John Wesley Powell’s Demise
By 1892, Congress had deprived the Geological Survey of the funding needed to carry out its work. Powell’s crusade was over. Western settlement would continue, unimpeded by science or rational study.
He tried. When Montanans met for their constitutional convention (Montana gained statehood in 1889), Powell tried to tell them some of their plans wouldn’t work. As one biographer wrote of this meeting, “What he suggested was so radical that it could not possibly have any effect on the delegates, so rational that it could not possibly come to pass short of heaven, so intelligently reasoned from fact that it must have sounded to Montana’s tradition-and-myth-bound constitution-makers like the program of a crank.”
Likewise, at an Irrigation Congress at Los Angeles in 1893, John Wesley Powell told the delegates, “I tell you gentlemen you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not enough water to supply the land.” The delegates booed him. “Science had gone down before credulity, superstition, habit.”
Consequences
Obviously, I’m only guessing here. But it seems fair to write that significant human suffering could’ve been averted had 1880s Americans paid more attention to Powell and less to the profits of railroads. His fears about excessive litigation over water rights came to pass, something that any historian of the Colorado River could explain for you. (I read a book on this topic once. It, like the lower Colorado River itself, was a little dry.)
But what’s always impressed me most about John Wesley Powell is that he had a plan based on research. His plan was flexible, too—different circumstances called for different policies. But that was as un-American as cricket to most decisionmakers of Powell’s era.
John Wesley Powell also anticipated that in order to supply water via irrigation, the national government would have to take the lead. Individuals, cities, or even states lacked the resources to move enough water to help Western farmers. This realization became fact with the 1902 Newlands Reclamation Act. It passed, ironically, the same year that Powell died.
He wasn’t quite an environmentalist by modern standards, however. Powell was very much in the 19th century tradition of maximizing utility when it came to nature. But, still, had more people in power listened to John Wesley Powell in the 1880s, it’s probable that the lives of Americans would have improved.
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